This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

Open source security team has had enough of embedded-systems vendors taking the piss with licensing:

This announcement is our public statement that we've had enough. Companies in the embedded industry not playing by the same rules as every other company using our software violates users' rights, misleads users and developers, and harms our ability to continue our work. Though I've only gone into depth in this announcement on the latest trademark violation against us, our experience with two GPL violations over the previous year have caused an incredible amount of frustration. These concerns are echoed by the complaints of many others about the treatment of the GPL by the embedded Linux industry in particular over many years.

With that in mind, today's announcement is concerned with the future availability of our stable series of patches. We decided that it is unfair to our sponsors that the above mentioned unlawful players can get away with their activity. Therefore, two weeks from now, we will cease the public dissemination of the stable series and will make it available to sponsors only. The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public to avoid impact to the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities. If this does not resolve the issue, despite strong indications that it will have a large impact, we may need to resort to a policy similar to Red Hat's, described here or eventually stop the stable series entirely as it will be an unsustainable development model.

This is an amazing post from Bunnie Huang, reverse engineering the Mediatek MT6260 to make "Fernvale", an open, hackable reference platform. Also worth noting for the "facts are not copyrightable" section regarding the legality of extracting memory locations and bitmasks from a copyrighted include file...

'We released Fernvale because we think it’s imperative to exercise our fair use rights to reverse engineer and create interoperable, open source solutions. Rights tend to atrophy and get squeezed out by competing interests if they are not vigorously exercised; for decades engineers have sat on the sidelines and seen ever more expansive patent and copyright laws shrink their latitude to learn freely and to innovate. I am saddened that the formative tinkering I did as a child is no longer a legal option for the next generation of engineers. The rise of the Shanzhai and their amazing capabilities is a wake-up call. I see it as evidence that a permissive IP environment spurs innovation, especially at the grass-roots level. If more engineers become aware of their fair use rights, and exercise them vigorously and deliberately, perhaps this can catalyze a larger and much-needed reform of the patent and copyright system.'

This looks really nice -- it's quite similar to something I was hacking on a while back. Only problem is that it's AGPL-licensed...

'Pushpin makes it easy to create HTTP long-polling and streaming services using any web stack as the backend. It’s compatible with any framework, whether Django, Rails, ASP, or even PHP. Pushpin works as a reverse proxy, sitting in front of your server application and managing all of the open client connections.'

'allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads.' actively maintained, Windows and UNIX

'Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses [specified on the command line] will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh. Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.'

1. made him take an effective pay cut; 2. removed decision authority on Java; 3. he felt Oracle was "ethically challenged". also: 'he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java'; “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” he doesn't pull any punches. oh dear, this is all adding up...

'an open source JavaScript library that produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.' quite pretty

'File-based, rather than tuple-based processing'; based around UNIX command-line toolset; good UNIXish UI; lots of caching of intermediate results; low setup overhead -- although it does require a shared POSIX filesystem, e.g. NFS, for synchronization